The Modern Railroad by Edward Hungerford

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Title: The Modern Railroad

Author: Edward Hungerford

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Language: English

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THE MODERN RAILROAD

T

Ready for the day’s run

THE

MODERN RAILROAD

BY

EDWARD HUNGERFORD

AUTHOR OF “LITTLE CORKY,” “THE MAN WHO STOLE A

RAILROAD,” ETC.

WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS

FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

CHICAGO

A. C. McCLURG & CO.

1911

Copyright

A. C. McCLURG & CO.

1911

Published November, 1911

Entered at Stationers’ Hall, London, England

PRESS OF THE VAIL COMPANY

COSHOCTON, U. S. A.

TO MY FATHER

IN RECOGNITION OF HIS

INTEREST AND APPRECIATION

THIS BOOK

IS DEDICATED

PREFACE

O bring to the great lay mind some slight idea of the intricacy and the involved detail of railroad operation is
the purpose of this book. Of the intricacies and involved details of railroad finance and railroad politics; of the

quarrels between the railroads, the organizations of their employees, the governmental commissions, or the
shippers, it says little or nothing. These difficult and pertinent questions have been and still are being competently
discussed by other writers.

[Pg vii]

The author wishes to acknowledge the courtesy of the editors and publishers of Harper’s Monthly, Harper’s
Weekly, The Saturday Evening Post, and Outing in permitting the introduction into this work of portions or
entire articles which he has written for them in the past. He would also feel remiss if he did not publish his sincere
acknowledgments to “The American Railway,” a compilation from Scribner’s Magazine, published in 1887, Mr.
Logan G. McPherson’s “The Workings of the Railroad,” Mr. C. F. Carter’s “When Railroads Were New,” and
Mr. Frank H. Spearman’s “The Strategy of Great Railroads.” Out of a sizable reference library of railroad works,
these volumes were the most helpful to him in the preparation of certain chapters of this book.

E. H.

Brooklyn, New York,

August 1, 1911.

CONTENTS

PAGE

CHAPTER I

The Railroads and Their Beginnings
1

Two great groups of railroads; East to West, and North to South—Some of the giant
roads—Canals—Development of the country’s natural resources—Railroad projects—
Locomotives imported—First locomotive of American manufacture—Opposition of
canal-owners to railroads—Development of Pennsylvania’s anthracite mines—The
merging of small lines into systems.

CHAPTER II

The Gradual Development of the Railroad
15

Alarm of canal-owners at the success of railroads—The making of the Baltimore &
Ohio—The “Tom Thumb” engine—Difficulties in crossing the Appalachians—Extension
to Pittsburgh—Troubles of the Erie Railroad—This road the first to use the telegraph—
The prairies begin to be crossed by railways—Chicago’s first railroad, the Galena &
Chicago Union—Illinois Central—Rock Island, the first to span the Mississippi—
Proposals to run railroads to the Pacific—The Central Pacific organized—It and the
Union Pacific meet—Other Pacific roads.

CHAPTER III

The Building of a Railroad
34

Cost of a single-track road—Financing—Securing a charter—Survey-work and its
dangers—Grades—Construction—Track-laying.

CHAPTER IV

Tunnels
48

Their use in reducing grades—The Hoosac Tunnel—The use of shafts—Tunnelling
under water—The Detroit River tunnel.

CHAPTER V

Bridges
56

Bridges of timber, then stone, then steel—The Starucca Viaduct—The first iron bridge in
the United States—Steel bridges—Engineering triumphs—Different types of railroad
bridge—The deck span and the truss span—Suspension bridges—Cantilever bridges—
Reaching the solid rock with caissons—The work of “sand-hogs”—The cantilever over
the Pend Oreille River—Variety of problems in bridge-building—Points in favor of the
stone bridge—Bridges over the Keys of Florida.

CHAPTER VI

[Pg viii]

[Pg ix]

[Pg x]

The Passenger Stations
80

Early trains for suburbanites—Importance of the towerman—Automatic switch systems
—The interlocking machine—Capacities of the largest passenger terminals—Room for
locomotives, car-storage, etc.—Storing and cleaning cars—The concourse—Waiting-
rooms—Baggage accommodations—Heating—Great development of passenger
stations—Some notable stations in America.

CHAPTER VII

The Freight Terminals and the Yards
107

Convenience of having freight stations at several points in a city—The Pennsylvania
Railroad’s scheme at New York as an example—Coal handled apart from other freight
—Assorting the cars—The transfer house—Charges for the use of cars not promptly
returned to their home roads—The hard work of the yardmaster.

CHAPTER VIII

The Locomotives and the Cars
119

Honor required in the building of a locomotive—Some of the early locomotives—Some
notable locomotive-builders—Increase of the size of engines—Stephenson’s air-brake
—The workshops—The various parts of the engine—Cars of the old-time—
Improvements by Winans and others—Steel cars for freight.

CHAPTER IX

Rebuilding a Railroad
138

Reconstruction necessary in many cases—Old grades too heavy—Curves straightened
—Tunnels avoided—These improvements required especially by freight lines.

CHAPTER X

The Railroad and its President
152

Supervision of the classified activities—Engineering, operating, maintenance of way, etc.
—The divisional system as followed in the Pennsylvania Road—The departmental plan
as followed in the New York Central—Need for vice-presidents—The board of
directors—Harriman a model president—How the Pennsylvania forced itself into New
York City—Action of a president to save the life of a laborer’s child—“Keep right on
obeying orders”—Some railroad presidents compared—High salaries of presidents.

CHAPTER XI

The Legal and Financial Departments
170

Functions of general counsel, and those of general attorney—A shrewd legal mind’s
worth to a railroad—The function of the claim-agent—Men and women who feign injury
—The secret service as an aid to the claim-agent—Wages of employees the greatest of
a railroad’s expenditures—The pay-car—The comptroller or auditor—Division of the
income from through tickets—Claims for lost or damaged freight—Purchasing-agent and
store-keeper.

CHAPTER XII

The General Manager
187

His duty to keep employees in harmonious actions—“The superintendent deals with
men; the general manager with superintendents”—“The general manager is really king”—
Cases in which his power is almost despotic—He must know men.

CHAPTER XIII
The Superintendent
202

His headship of the transportation organism—His manner of dealing with an offended
shipper—His manner with commuters—His manner with a spiteful “kicker”—A
dishonest conductor who had a “pull”—A system of demerits for employees—Dealing
with drunkards—With selfish and covetous men.

[Pg xi]

CHAPTER XIV

Operating the Railroad
220

Authority of the chief clerk and that of the assistant superintendent—Responsibilities of
engineers, firemen, master mechanic, train-master, train-despatcher—Arranging the
time-table—Fundamental rules of operation—Signals—Selecting engine and cars for a
train—Clerical work of conductors—A trip with the conductor—The despatcher’s
authority—Signals along the line—Maintenance of way—Superintendent of bridges and
buildings—Road-master—Section boss.

CHAPTER XV

The Fellows Out Upon the Line
243

Men who run the trains must have brain as well as muscle—Their training—From
farmer’s boy to engineer—The brakeman’s dangerous work—Baggagemen and mail
clerks—Hand-switchmen—The multifarious duties of country station-agents.

CHAPTER XVI

Keeping The Line Open
256

The wrecking train and its supplies—Floods dammed by an embankment—Right of way
always given to the wrecking-train—Expeditious work in repairing the track—Collapse
of the roof of a tunnel—Telegraph crippled by storms—Winter storms the severest test
—Trains in quick succession help to keep the line open in snowstorms—The rotary
plough.

CHAPTER XVII

The G. P. A. and His Office
276

He has to keep the road advertised—Must be an after-dinner orator, and many-sided—
His geniality, urbanity, courtesy—Excessive rivalry for passenger traffic—Increasing
luxury in Pullman cars—Many printed forms of tickets, etc.

CHAPTER XVIII

The Luxury of Modern Railroad Travel
292

Special trains provided—Private cars—Specials for actors, actresses, and musicians—
Crude coaches on early railroads—Luxurious old-time sleeping-cars—Pullman’s
sleepers made at first from old coaches—His pioneer—The first dining-cars—The
present-day dining-cars—Dinners, table d’hôte and a la carte—Café-cars—Buffet-
cars—Care for the comfort of women.

CHAPTER XIX

Getting the City out into the Country
311

Commuters’ trains in many towns—Rapid increase in the volume of suburban travel—
Electrification of the lines—Long Island Railroad almost exclusively suburban—Varied
distances of suburban homes from the cities—Club-cars for commuters—Staterooms in
the suburban cars—Special transfer commuters.

CHAPTER XX
Freight Traffic
325

Income from freight traffic greater than from passenger—Competition in freight rates—
Afterwards a standard rate-sheet—Rate-wars virtually ended by the Interstate
Commerce Commission classification of freight into groups—Differential freight rates—
Demurrage for delay in emptying cars—Coal traffic—Modern methods of handling lard
and other freight.

CHAPTER XXI

The Drama of the Freight
343

[Pg xii]

[Pg xiii]

Fast trains for precious and perishable goods—Cars invented for fruits and for fish—
Milk trains—Systematic handling of the cans—Auctioning garden-truck at midnight—A
historic city freight-house.

CHAPTER XXII
Making Traffic
355

Enticing settlers to the virgin lands of the West—Emigration bureaus—Railways
extended for the benefit of emigrants—The first continuous railroad across the American
continent—Campaigns for developing sparsely settled places in the West—Unprofitable
branch railroads in the East—Development of scientific farming—Improved farms are
traffic-makers—New factories being opened—How railroad managers have developed
Atlantic City.

CHAPTER XXIII

The Express Service and the Railroad Mail
369

Development of express business—Railroad conductors the first mail and express
messengers—William F. Harnden’s express service—Postage rates—Establishment and
organization of great express companies—Collection and distribution of express matter
—Relation between express companies and railroads—Beginnings of post-office
department—Statistics—Railroad mail service—Newspaper delivery—Handling of mail
matter—Growth of the service.

CHAPTER XXIV

The Mechanical Departments
388

Care and repair of cars and engines—The locomotive cleaned and inspected after each
long journey—Frequent visits of engines to the shops and foundries at Altoona—The
table for testing the power and speed of locomotives—The car shops—Steel cars
beginning to supersede wooden ones—Painting a freight car—Lack of method in early
repair shops—Search for flaws in wheels.

CHAPTER XXV

The Railroad Marine
404

Steamship lines under railroad control—Fleet of New York Central—Tugs—Railroad
connections at New York harbor—Handling of freight—Ferry-boats—Tunnel under
Detroit River—Car-ferries and lake routes—Great Lakes steamship lines under railroad
control.

CHAPTER XXVI

Keeping in Touch with the Men
418

The first organized branch of the Railroad Y. M. C. A.—Cornelius Vanderbilt’s gift of a
club-house—Growth of the Railroad Y. M. C. A.—Plans by the railways to care for the
sick and the crippled—The pension system—Entertainments— Model restaurants—
Free legal advice—Employees’ magazines—The Order of the Red Spot.

CHAPTER XXVII

The Coming of Electricity
432

Electric street cars—Suburban cars—Electric third-rail from Utica to Syracuse—Some
railroads partially adopt electric power—The benefit of electric power in tunnels—Also
at terminal stations—Conditions which make electric traction practical and economical
—Hopeful outlook for electric traction—The monorail and the gyroscope car, invented
by Louis Brennan—A similar invention by August Scherl.

Appendix
449

Efficiency through Organization.

Index
465

[Pg xiv]

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

Ready for the day’s run
Frontispiece

An early locomotive built by William Norris for the Philadelphia & Reading
Railroad
18

The historic “John Bull” of the Camden & Amboy Railroad—and its train
18

A heavy-grade type of locomotive built for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in
1864. Its flaring stack was typical of those years
19

Construction engineers blaze their way across the face of new country
38

The making of an embankment by dump-train
39

“Small temporary railroads peopled with hordes of restless engines”
39

Cutting a path for the railroad through the crest of the high hills
44

A giant fill—in the making
44

The finishing touches to the track
45

This machine can lay a mile of track a day
45

“Sometimes the construction engineer ... brings his line face to face with a
mountain”
52

Finishing the lining of a tunnel
52

The busiest tunnel point in the world—at the west portals of the Bergen tunnels,
six Erie tracks below, four Lackawanna above
53

The Hackensack portals of the Pennsylvania’s great tunnels under New York
City
53

Concrete affords wonderful opportunities for the bridge-builders
68

The Lackawanna is building the largest concrete bridge in the world across the
Delaware River at Slateford, Pa.
68

The bridge-builder lays out an assembling-yard for gathering together the
different parts of his new construction
69

The new Brandywine Viaduct of the Baltimore & Ohio, at Wilmington, Del.
69

The Northwestern’s monumental new terminal on the West Side of Chicago
82

The Union Station at Washington
83

A model American railroad station—the Union Station of the New York
Central, Boston & Albany, Delaware & Hudson, and West Shore railroads at
Albany
102

The classic portal of the Pennsylvania’s new station in New York
102

The beautiful concourse of the new Pennsylvania Station, in New York
103

“The waiting-room is the monumental and artistic expression of the station”—the
waiting-room of the Union Depot at Troy, New York
103

Something over a million dollars’ worth of passenger cars are constantly stored
in this yard
114

A scene in the great freight-yards that surround Chicago
114

The intricacy of tracks and the “throat” of a modern terminal yard: South Station,
Boston, and its approaches
115

One of the “diamond-stack” locomotives used on the Pennsylvania Railroad in
the early seventies
126

Prairie type passenger locomotive of the Lake Shore Railroad
126

Pacific type passenger locomotive of the New York Central lines
126

Atlantic type passenger locomotive, built by the Pennsylvania Railroad at its
Altoona shops
126

One of the great Mallet pushing engines of the Delaware & Hudson Company
127

A ten-wheeled switching locomotive of the Lake Shore Railroad
127

[Pg xv]

[Pg xvi]

Suburban passenger locomotive of the New York Central lines
127

Consolidation freight locomotive of the Pennsylvania system
127

Where Harriman stretched the Southern Pacific in a straight line across the Great
Salt Lake
140

Line revision on the New York Central—tunnelling through the bases of these
jutting peaks along the Hudson River does away with sharp and dangerous
curves
140

Impressive grade revision on the Union Pacific in the Black Hills of Wyoming.
The discarded line may be seen at the right
141

The old and the new on the Great Northern—the “William Crooks,” the first
engine of the Hill system, and one of the newest Mallets
154

The Southern Pacific finds direct entrance into San Francisco for one of its
branch lines by tunnels piercing the heart of the suburbs
155

Portal of the abandoned tunnel of the Alleghany Portage Railroad near
Johnstown, Pa., the first railroad tunnel in the United States
155

The freight department of the modern railroad requires a veritable army of clerks
176

The farmer who sued the railroad for permanent injuries—as the detectives with
their cameras found him
177

Oil-burning locomotive on the Southern Pacific system
190

The steel passenger coach such as has become standard upon the American
railroad
190

Electric car, generating its own power by a gasoline engine
190

Both locomotive and train—gasoline motor car designed for branch line service
190

The biggest locomotive in the world: built by the Santa Fe Railroad at its Topeka
shops
191

The conductor is a high type of railroad employee
208

The engineer—oil-can in hand—is forever fussing at his machine
208

Railroad responsibility does not end even with the track walker
209

The fireman has a hard job and a steady one
209

How the real timetable of the division looks—the one used in headquarters
222

The electro-pneumatic signal-box in the control tower of a modern terminal
228

The responsible men who stand at the switch-tower of a modern terminal: a
large tower of the “manual” type
228

“When winter comes upon the lines the superintendent will have full use for every
one of his wits”
229

Watchful signals guarding the main line of a busy railroad
229

“When the train comes to a water station the fireman gets out and fills the tank”
248

A freight-crew and its “hack”
248

A view through the span of a modern truss bridge gives an idea of its strength
and solidity
249

The New York Central is adopting the new form of “Upper quadrant” signal
249

The wrecking train ready to start out from the yard
262

“Two of these great cranes can grab a wounded Mogul locomotive and put her
out of the way”
262

“The shop-men form no mean brigade in this industrial army of America”
263

“Winter days when the wind-blown snow forms mountains upon the tracks”
272

“The despatcher may have come from some lonely country station”
273

“The superintendent is not above getting out and bossing the wrecking-gang
once in a great while”
273

The New York Central Railroad is building a new Grand Central Station in New
York City, for itself and its tenant, the New York, New Haven & Hartford
Railroad
284

The concourse of the new Grand Central Station, New York, will be one of the
largest rooms in the world
284

South Station, Boston, is the busiest railroad terminal in the world
285

[Pg xvii]

[Pg xviii]

The train-shed and approach tracks of Broad Street Station, Philadelphia, still
one of the finest of American railroad passenger terminals
285

Connecting drawing-room and stateroom
296

“A man may have as fine a bed in a sleeping-car as in the best hotel in all the
land”
296

“You may have the manicure upon the modern train”
297

“The dining-car is a sociable sort of place”
297

An interior view of one of the earliest Pullman sleeping-cars
302

Interior of a standard sleeping-car of to-day
303

“Even in winter there is a homely, homey air about the commuter’s station”
314

Entrance to the great four-track open cut which the Erie has built for the
commuter’s comfort at Jersey City
314

A model way-station on the lines of the Boston & Albany Railroad
315

The yardmaster’s office—in an abandoned switch-tower
315

“The inside of any freight-house is a busy place”
328

St. John’s Park, the great freight-house of the New York Central Railroad in
down-town New York
328

The great ore-docks of the West Shore Railroad at Buffalo
329

The great bridge of the New York Central at Watkins Glen
340

Building the wonderful bridge of the Idaho & Washington Northern over the
Pend Oreille River, Washington
341

Inside the West Albany shops of the New York Central: picking up a
locomotive with the travelling crane
350

A locomotive upon the testing-table at the Altoona shops of the Pennsylvania
350

“The roundhouse is a sprawling thing”
351

Denizens of the roundhouse
351

“In the Far West the farm-train has long since come into its own”
360

“Even in New York State the interest in these itinerant agricultural schools is
keen, indeed”
361

Interior of the dairy demonstration car of an agricultural train
361

The famous Thomas Viaduct, on the Baltimore & Ohio at Relay, Md., built by
B. H. Latrobe in 1835, and still in use
366

The historic Starucca Viaduct upon the Erie
366

The cylinders of the Delaware & Hudson Mallet
367

The interior of this gasoline-motor-car on the Union Pacific presents a most
unusual effect, yet a maximum of view of the outer world
367

A portion of the great double-track Susquehanna River bridge of the Baltimore
& Ohio—a giant among American railroad bridges
372

“In summer the brakemen have pleasant enough times of railroading”
373

A famous cantilever rapidly disappearing—the substitution of a new Kentucky
river bridge for the old, on the Queen & Crescent system
373

Triple-phase, alternating current locomotive built by the General Electric Co. for
use in the Cascade Tunnel, of the Great Northern Railway
390

Heavy service, alternating and direct current freight locomotive built by the
Westinghouse Company for the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad
390

The monoroad in practical use for carrying passengers at City Island, New York
391

The cigar-shaped car of the monoroad
391

A modern railroad freight and passenger terminal: the terminal of the West Shore
Railroad at Weehawken, opposite New York City
406

High-speed, direct-current passenger locomotive built by the General Electric
Company for terminal service of the New York Central at the Grand Central
Station
407

This is what New York Central McCrea did for the men of the Canadian Pacific
up at Kenora
420

A clubhouse built by the Southern Pacific for its men at Roseville, California
420

[Pg xix]

F

The B. & O. boys enjoying the Railroad Y. M. C. A., Chicago Junction
421

“The Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company has organized a brass band for its
employees”
421

A high-speed electric locomotive on the Pennsylvania bringing a through train out
of the tunnel underneath the Hudson River and into the New York City terminal
434

High-speed, direct-current locomotive built by the Westinghouse Company for
the terminal service of the Pennsylvania Railroad, in New York
434

Two triple-phase locomotives of the Great Northern Railway helping a double-
header steam train up the grade into the Cascade Tunnel
435

The outer shell of the New Haven’s freight locomotive removed, showing the
working parts of the machine
435

The railroad is a monster. His feet are dipped into the navigable seas, and his many arms reach into the
uplands. His fingers clutch the treasures of the hills—coal, iron, timber—all the wealth of Mother Earth.
His busy hands touch the broad prairies of corn, wheat, fruits—the yearly produce of the land. With
ceaseless activity he brings the raw material that it may be made into the finished. He centralizes industry.
He fills the ships that sail the seas. He brings the remote town in quick touch with the busy city. He
stimulates life. He makes life.

His arms stretch through the towns and over the land. His steel muscles reach across great rivers and
deep valleys, his tireless hands have long since burrowed their way through God’s eternal hills. He is here,
there, everywhere. His great life is part and parcel of the great life of the nation.

He reaches an arm into an unknown country, and it is known! Great tracts of land that were untraversed
become farms; hillsides yield up their mineral treasure; a busy town springs into life where there was no
habitation of man a little time before, and the town becomes a city. Commerce is born. The railroad bids
death and stagnation begone. It creates. It reaches forth with its life, and life is born.

The railroad is life itself!

THE MODERN RAILROAD

CHAPTER I

THE RAILROADS AND THEIR BEGINNINGS

Two Great Groups of Railroads; East to West, and North to South

—Some of the Giant Roads—Canals—Development of the
Country’s
Natural
Resources—Railroad
Projects—

Locomotives Imported—First Locomotive of American
Manufacture—Opposition of Canal-owners to Railroads—
Development of Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Mines—The
Merging of Small Lines into Systems.

IFTEEN or twenty great railroad systems are the overland carriers of the United States. Measured by
corporations, known by a vast variety of differing names, there are many, many more than these. But this

great number is reduced, through common ownership or through a common purpose in operation, to less than a
score of transportation organisms, each with its own field, its own purposes, and its own ambitions.

The greater number of these railroads reach from east to west, and so follow the natural lines of traffic within the

[Pg xx]

[Pg xxi]

[Pg 1]

country. Two or three systems—such as the Illinois Central and the Delaware & Hudson—run at variance with
this natural trend, and may be classed as cross-country routes. A few properties have no long-reaching routes,
but derive their incomes from the transportation business of a comparatively small exclusive territory, as the
Boston & Maine in Northern New England, the New Haven in Southern New England, both of them recently
brought under a more or less direct single control, and the Long Island. Still other properties find their greatest
revenue in bringing anthracite coal from the Pennsylvania mountains to the seaboard, and among these are the
Lackawanna, the Lehigh Valley, the Central Railroad of New Jersey, and the Philadelphia & Reading systems.

The very great railroads of America are the east and west lines. These break themselves quite naturally into two
divisions—one group east of the Mississippi River, the other west of that stream. The easterly group aim to find
an eastern terminal in and about New York. Their western arms reach Chicago and St. Louis, where the other
group of transcontinentals begin.

Giants among these eastern roads are the Pennsylvania and the New York Central. Of lesser size, but still ranking
as great railroads within this territory are the Chesapeake & Ohio, the Baltimore & Ohio, and the Erie. Several of
the anthracite roads enjoy through connections to Chicago and St. Louis, breaking at Buffalo as an interchange
point, about half way between New York and Chicago. There are important roads in the South, reaching
between Gulf points and New York and taking care of the traffic of the centres of the section, now rapidly
increasing its industrial importance.

The western group of transcontinental routes are the giants in point of mileage. The eastern roads, serving a
closely-built country, carry an almost incredible tonnage; but the long, gaunt western lines are reaching into a
country that has its to-morrow still ahead. Of these, the so-called Harriman lines—the Southern Pacific and the
Union Pacific—occupy the centre of the country, and reach from the Mississippi to the Pacific. The Santa Fe and
the Gould roads share this territory.

To the north of the Harriman lines, J. J. Hill has his wonderful group of railroads, the Burlington, the Great
Northern, and the Northern Pacific, together reaching from Chicago to the north Pacific coast. Still farther north
Canada has her own transcontinental in the Canadian Pacific Railway, another approaching completion in the
Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. The “Grangers” (so called from their original purpose as grain carriers), that occupy
the eastern end of this western territory,—the St. Paul, the Gould lines, the Northwestern and the Rock Island—
are just now showing pertinent interest in reaching the Pacific, with its great Oriental trade in its infancy. The first
two of these have already laid their rails over the great slopes of the Rocky Mountains and so it is that the building
of railroads in the United States is nowhere near a closed book at the present time.

The better to understand the causes that went to the making of these great systems, it may be well to go back into
the past, to examine the eighty years that the railroad has been in the making. These busy years are illuminating.
They tell with precise accuracy the development of American transportation. Yet, as we can devote to them only
a few brief pages, our review of them must be cursory.

When the Revolution was completed and the United States of America firmly established as a nation, the people
began to give earnest attention to internal improvement and development. Under the control of a distant and
unsympathetic nation there had been very little encouragement for development; but with an independent nation all
was very different. The United States began vaguely to realize their vast inherent wealth. How to develop that
wealth was the surpassing problem. It became evident from the first that it must depend almost wholly on
transportation facilities. To appreciate the dimensions of this problem it must be understood that at the beginning
of the last century a barrel of flour was worth five dollars at Baltimore. It cost four dollars to transport it to that
seaport from Wheeling; so it follows, that flour must be sold at Wheeling at one dollar a barrel for the Baltimore
market. With a better form of transportation it would cost a dollar a barrel to carry the flour from Wheeling to
Baltimore, making the price of the commodity at the first of these points under transit facilities four dollars a
barrel. It did not take much of that sort of reasoning to make the States appreciate from the very first that a great
effort must be made toward development. That effort, having been made, brought its own reward.

The very first efforts toward transportation development lay in the canal works. Canals had already proved their
success in England and within Continental Europe, and their introduction into the United States established their
value from the beginning. Some of the earliest of these were built in New England before the Revolution. After the
close of that conflict many others were planned and built. The great enterprise of the State of New York in
planning and building the Erie, or Grand Canal, as it was at first called, from Albany to Buffalo—from Atlantic
tidewater to the navigable Great Lakes was a tremendous stimulus to similar enterprises along the entire
seaboard. Canals were built for many hundreds of miles, and in nearly every case they proved their worth at the
outset. Canals were also projected for many, many hundreds of additional miles, for the success of the earliest of
these ditches was a great encouragement to other investments of the sort, even where there existed far less
necessity for their construction. Then there was a halt to canal-building for a little time.

The invention of the steamboat just a century ago was an incentive indirectly to canal growth but there were other
things that halted the minds of farsighted and conservative men. Canals were fearfully expensive things; likewise,
they were delicate works, in need of constant and expensive repairs to keep them in order. Moreover, there were
many winter months in which they were frozen and useless. It was quite clear to these farsighted men from the

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outset that the canal was not the real solution of the transportation problem upon which rested the internal
development of the United States.

They turned their attention to roads. But, while roads were comparatively easy to maintain and were possible
routes of communication the entire year round, they could not begin to compare with the canals in point of
tonnage capacity, because of the limitations of the drawing power of animals. Some visionary souls experimented
with sail wagons, but of course with no practical results.

At this time there came distinct rumors from across the sea of a new transportation method in England—the
railroad. The English railroads were crude affairs built to handle the products of the collieries in the northeast
corner of the country, to bring the coal down to the docks. But there came more rumors—of a young engineer,
one Stephenson, who had perfected some sort of a steam wagon that would run on rails—a locomotive he called
it,—and there was to be one of these railroads built from Stockton to Darlington to carry passengers and also
freight. These reports were of vast interest to the earnest men who were trying to solve this perplexing problem of
internal transportation. Some of them, who owned collieries up in the northeastern portion of Pennsylvania and
who were concerned with the proposition of getting their product to tidewater, were particularly interested. These
gentlemen were called the Delaware & Hudson Company, and they had already accomplished much in building a
hundred miles of canal from Honesdale, an interior town, across a mountainous land to Kingston on the navigable
Hudson River. But the canal, considered a monumental work in its day, solved only a part of the problem. There
still remained the stiff ridge of the Moosic Mountain that no canal work might ever possibly climb.

To the Delaware & Hudson Company, then, the railroad proposition was of absorbing interest, of sufficient
interest to warrant it in sending Horatio Allen, one of the canal engineers, all the way to England for investigation
and report. Allen was filled with the enthusiasm of youth. He went prepared to look into a new era in
transportation.

In the meantime other railroad projects were also under way in the country, short and crude affairs though they
were. As early as 1807 Silas Whitney built a short line on Beacon Hill, Boston, which is accredited as being the
first American railroad. It was a simple affair with an inclined plane which was used to handle brick; and it is said
that it was preceded twelve years by an even more crude tramway, built for the same purpose. Another early
short length of railroad was built by Thomas Leiper at his quarry in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. It has its
chief interest from the fact that it was designed by John Thomson, father of J. Edgar Thomson, who became at a
much later day president of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, and who is known as one of the master minds in
American transportation progress. Similar records remain of the existence of a short line near Richmond, Va.,
built to carry supplies to a powder mill, and other lines at Bear Creek Furnace, Pennsylvania, and at Nashua, N.
H. But the only one of these roads that seems to have attained a lasting distinction was one built by Gridley Bryant
in 1826 to carry granite for the Bunker Hill Monument from the quarries at Quincy, Mass., to the docks four
miles distant. This road was built of heavy wooden rails attached in a substantial way to stone sleepers imbedded
in the earth. It attained considerable distinction and became of such general interest that a public house was
opened alongside its rails to accommodate sightseers from afar who came to see it. This railroad continued in
service for more than a quarter of a century.

But the motive power of all these railroads was the horse; and it was patent from the outset that the horse had
neither the staying nor the hauling powers to make him a real factor in the railroad situation. So when Horatio
Allen returned to New York from England in January, 1829, with glowing accounts of the success of the English
railroads, he found the progressive men of the Delaware & Hudson anxiously awaiting an inspection of the
Stourbridge Lion, the first of four locomotives purchased by Allen for importation into the United States. Three
of these machines were from the works of Foster, Rastrick & Co., of Stourbridge; the fourth was the creation of
Stephenson’s master hand. The Lion arrived in May of that year, and after having been set up on blocks and fired
for the benefit of a group of scientific men in New York it was shipped by river and canal to Honesdale.

Allen placed the Stourbridge Lion—which resembled a giant grasshopper with its mass of exterior valves, and
joints—on the crude wooden track of the railroad, which extended over the mountain to Carbondale, seventeen
miles distant. A few days later—the ninth of August, to be exact—he ran the Lion, the first turning of an engine
wheel upon American soil. Details of that scene have come easily down to to-day. The track was built of heavy
hemlock stringers on which bars of iron, two and a quarter inches wide and one-half an inch thick were spiked.
The engine weighed seven tons, instead of three tons, as had been expected. It so happened that the rails had
become slightly warped just above the terminal of the railroad, where the track crossed the Lackawaxen Creek
on a bending trestle. Allen had been warned against this trestle and his only response was to call for passengers
upon the initial ride. No one accepted. There was a precious Pennsylvania regard shown for the safety of one’s
neck. So, after running the engine up and down the coal dock for a few minutes, Allen waved good-bye to the
crowd, opened his throttle wide open and dashed away from the village around the abrupt curve and over the
trembling trestle at a rate of ten miles an hour. The crowd which had expected to see the engine derailed, broke
into resounding cheers. The initial trial of a locomotive in the United States had served to prove its worth.

The career of the Stourbridge Lion was short lived. It hauled coal cars for a little time at Honesdale; but it was
too big an engine for so slight a railroad, and it was soon dismantled. Its boiler continued to serve the Delaware &
Hudson Company for many years at its shops on the hillside above Carbondale. The fate of the three other

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imported English locomotives remains a mystery. They were brought to New York and stored, eventually to find
their way to the scrap heap in some unknown fashion.

Mr. Allen held no short-lived career. His experiments with the locomotive ranked him as a railroad engineer of the
highest class, and before the year 1829 closed he was made chief engineer of what was at first known as the
Charleston & Hamburg Railroad, and afterwards as the South Carolina Railroad. This was an ambitious project,
designed to connect the old Carolina seaport with the Savannah River, one hundred and thirty-six miles distant. It
achieved its greatest fame as the railroad which first operated a locomotive of American manufacture.

This engine, called the Best Friend of Charleston, was built at the West Point Foundry in New York City and
was shipped to Charleston in the Fall of 1830. It was a crude affair, and on its trial trip, on November 2, of that
year, it sprung a wheel out of shape and became derailed. Still it was a beginning; and after the wheels had been
put in good shape it entered into regular service, which was more than the Stourbridge Lion had ever done. It
could haul four or five cars with forty or fifty passengers at a speed of from fifteen to twenty-five miles an hour, so
the Charleston & Hamburg became the first of our steam railroads with a regular passenger service. A little later,
a bigger and better engine, also of American manufacture and called the West Point, was sent down from New
York.

Word of these early railroad experiments travelled across the country as if by some magic predecessor of the
telegraph. Other railroad projects found themselves under way. Another colliery railroad, a marvellous thing of
planes and gravity descents, was built at Mauch Chunk in the Lehigh Valley, and this stout old road is in use to-
day as a passenger-carrier.

But it was already seen that the future of the railroad was not to be limited to quarries or collieries. Up in New
England the railroad fever had taken hold with force; and in 1831, construction was begun on the Boston &
Lowell Railroad. This line was analogous to the Manchester & Liverpool, which proved itself from the beginning a
tremendous money-earner. Boston, a seaport of sixty thousand inhabitants was to be linked with Lowell, then
possessing but six thousand inhabitants. Still, even in those days, Lowell had developed to a point that saw fifteen
thousand tons of freight and thirty-seven thousand passengers handled between the two cities over the Middlesex
Canal in 1829.

Then there developed the first of a new sort of antagonism that the railroad was to face. The owners of the canals
were keen-sighted enough to discover a dangerous new antagonist in the railroads. They protested to the
Legislature that their charter gave them a monopoly of the carrying privileges between Boston and Lowell, and for
two years they were able to strangle the ambitions of the proposed railroad. This fight was a type of other battles
that were to follow between the canals and the railroads. The various lines that reached across New York State
from Albany to Buffalo, paralleling the Erie Canal, were once prohibited from carrying freight, for fear that the
canal’s supremacy as a carrier might be disturbed. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, struggling to blaze a path
toward the West, was for a long time halted by the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which proposed to hold to its
monopoly of the valley of the Potomac.

The Boston & Lowell, however, conquered its obstacles and was finally opened to traffic, June 26, 1835. Within
a few months similar lines reaching from Boston to Worcester on the west, and Providence on the south had also
been opened. By 1839 Boston & Worcester had been extended through to Springfield on the Connecticut River,
where it connected with the Western Railroad, extending over the Berkshires to Greenbush, opposite Albany.
The Providence Road was rapidly extended through to Stonington, Connecticut. From that point fast steamboats
were operated through to New York, and a quick line of communication was established between Boston and
New York. Before that time the fastest route between these two cities had been by steamboat to Norwich, then
by coach over the post-road up to Boston. Norwich saw the railroad take away its supremacy in the through
traffic. Finally it awoke to its necessity, and arranged to build a railroad to reach the existing line at Providence.

Between New York and Philadelphia railroad communication came quickly into being, the first route opened
being the Camden & Amboy, which terminated at the end of a long ferry ride from New York. Even after more
direct routes had been established and the Delaware crossed at Trenton, it was many years before the trains ran
direct from Jersey City into the heart of the Quaker City. The cars from New York used to stop at Tacony,
considerably above the city and there was still a steamboat ride down the river.

The railroad route to Baltimore was only a partial one. A steamboat took the traveller to New Castle, Delaware,
where a short pioneer railroad crossed to French Town, Maryland. After that there was another long steamboat
ride down the flat reaches of the Chesapeake Bay before Baltimore was finally reached. A little later there
developed an all-rail route between Philadelphia and Baltimore although not upon the line of the present most
direct route.

From Philadelphia an early double-track railroad extended west to Columbia, upon the Susquehanna River. An
early route extended due north from Baltimore to York, and then to Harrisburg; the parent stem of what
afterwards became the Northern Central. A branch from this line was extended through to Columbia, and the
New Castle and French Town route lost popularity.

But the Columbia and Philadelphia route was destined to more important things than merely affording an all-rail

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route to Baltimore. At Columbia it connected with the important Pennsylvania State system of internal canals and
railroads, affording a direct line of communication with Pittsburgh and the headwaters of the Ohio River.

This was accomplished by use of a canal through to Hollidaysburgh upon the east slope of the Alleghanies, and
the well-famed Alleghany Portage Railroad over the summit of those mountains to Johnstown, where another
canal reached down into Pittsburgh and enjoyed unexampled prosperity from 1834 to 1854. The Alleghany
Portage railroad was a solidly constructed affair and its rails after the fashion of almost all railroads of that day
were laid upon stone sleepers, rows of which may still be seen where the long-since abandoned railroad found its
path across the mountains. The Portage Railroad was operated by the most elaborate system of inclined planes
ever put to service within the United States; one has only to turn to the pages of Dickens’s “American Notes” to
read:

“We left Harrisburg on Friday. On Sunday morning we arrived at the foot of the mountain, which
is crossed by railroad. There are ten inclined planes, five ascending and five descending; the
carriages are dragged up the former and slowly let down the latter by means of stationary
engines, the comparatively level spaces between being traversed sometimes by horse and
sometimes by engine power, as the case demands.... The journey is very carefully made,
however, only two carriages travelling together; and while proper precaution is taken, is not to
be dreaded for its dangers.”

The Portage Railroad was the first to surmount the Alleghanies although in course of time its elaborate system of
planes disappeared, as they disappeared elsewhere, under the development of the locomotive.

An interesting feature of the operation of the eastern end of this route of communication across the Keystone
State, which was afterwards to develop into the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad, was the communal nature of the
enterprise. The railroad was regarded as a highway. Any person was supposedly free to use its rails for the
hauling of his produce in his own cars. The theory of the Columbia & Philadelphia Railroad was simply that of an
improved turnpike. For ten years after the opening of the line in 1834, the horse-teams of private freight haulers
alternated upon the tracks between steam locomotives hauling trains. A team of worn-out horses hauling a four-
wheeled car, loaded with farm produce could, and frequently did keep a passenger train hauled by a steam
locomotive fretting along for hours behind it. In the end the use of horses was abolished on the Philadelphia &
Columbia—the name of the road had been reversed—and in 1857 the road was sold by the State to the newly
organized Pennsylvania Railroad Company. The Pennsylvania had already built a through rail route from
Columbia over the Alleghanies, and, by the aid of the wonderful Horse Shoe Curve and the Gallitzin Tunnel,
through to Pittsburgh; it had created its shop-town of Altoona and abandoned for all time the Alleghany Portage
Railroad. But before the consolidation came to pass, two companies had been organized to control freight-
carrying upon the tracks of the Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad. One of these was the People’s line, the other
the Union line; and in them was the germ of the private car lines, which in recent years have become so vexed a
problem to the Interstate Commerce Commission.

There were other short railroad lines in Pennsylvania, most of them built to bring the products of the rapidly
developing anthracite district down to tidewater. Across New York State another chain of little railroads, which
were in their turn to become the main stem of one of America’s mightiest systems, was under construction. The
first of this chain to be built was the Mohawk & Hudson, extending from the capital city of Albany, by means of a
sharply graded plane, to a tableland which brought it in turn to a descending plane at Schenectady. At this last city
it enjoyed a connection with the Erie Canal, and for a time the packet-boat men hailed the new railroad as a great
help to their trade. It shortened a great time-taking bend in the canal, and helped to popularize that waterway just
so much as a passenger carrier.

Afterwards the packet-boat men thought differently. Hardly had the Mohawk & Hudson been opened on August
9, 1831, by an excursion trip behind the American built locomotive DeWitt Clinton, when the railroad fever took
hold of New York State as hard as the canal fever had taken hold of it but a few years before. Railroads were
planned everywhere and some of them were built. Men began to dream of a link of railroads all the way through
from Albany to Buffalo and even the troubles of a decade, marked with a monumental financial crash, could not
entirely avail to stop railroad-building. The railroads came, step by step; one railroad from Schenectady to Utica,
another from that pent-up city to Syracuse, still another from Syracuse to Rochester. From Rochester separate
railroads led to Tonawanda and Niagara Falls; to Batavia, Attica, and Buffalo. But the panic of ’37 was a hard
blow to ambitious financial schemes, and it was six years thereafter before the all-rail route from Albany to
Buffalo was a reality.

Even after that it was a crude sort of affair. At several of the large towns across the State the continuity of the rails
was broken. Utica was jealous of this privilege and defended it on one occasion through a committee of eminent
draymen, ’bus-drivers, and inn-keepers, who went down to Albany to keep two of the early routes from making
rail connections within her boundaries. At Rochester there was a similar break, wherein both passengers and
freight had to be transported by horses across the city from the railroad that led from the east to the railroad that
led towards the west. This matter of carrying passengers across a city h...